Have you ever questioned the veracity of the characters and circumstances shown in David Fincher’s The Social Network? Exist Final Clubs? When developing Facemash, did Mark Zuckerberg really refer to his fiancée as a “bitch” in a blog post? Facemash: Was it real? If so, how did it receive 22,000 hits when there aren’t that many students at Harvard? Was Erica Albright, played by Rooney Mara, even real? Why is Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s longtime and present girlfriend, not even mentioned in the film? Was Bill Gates there really? If so, what did Zuckerberg think after watching the film? Why don’t Mark or Facebook file a lawsuit if some of the facts have been changed? After the jump, learn the responses to these and other questions.
The untold truth of The Social Network
Exist Final Clubs really? And if so, do they match how the movie depicts them?
Many of your questions will be answered in an interview with a former Final Club member and Harvard graduate that appears on Vulture. They are similar to fraternities, but they are “not associated with a bigger national organisation, and nobody lives in them,” according to the main thrust of the statement. Final Club’s name is “Because “back in the day, you would join the freshman club, then I forget what the intermediate stage was, and then you join the final club your senior year, it was considered a remnant of a bygone era. The name is thus. What he said about what is real and what was made up for the film is as follows:
They get the overall feel right. Obviously it’s a little sensationalized. The biggest final club scene is at what they claim is the Phoenix. The exterior shot is the Spee, not the Phoenix, and the interior shots are neither the Spee nor the Phoenix. But of course, who cares they’re buildings. They have the bouncer at the front who’s got an ear piece waving in all those girls … obviously that doesn’t really happen. There aren’t really buses of BU girls that come in. And they certainly don’t look like the girls in that movie. And then the parties themselves are less debauched than in that kind montage. There are generally fewer naked girls. Everything’s a little tamer.
While developing FaceMash, did Mark Zuckerberg actually blog that his girlfriend was a bitch?
Aye, he did. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay, actually used the transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s old LiveJournal blog, often verbatim (including html code) what Mark had written. Below is a transcript that you may read for yourself:
Does the fictional girlfriend played by Rooney Mara in the movie, Erica Albright, exist in real life?
May be. Jessica Alona is a bitch, Zuckerberg wrote in the journal. Jessica is just one of a select few names that Sorkin changed for the film. According to Sorkin, GouchoReviews:
“There was nothing in the movie that was invented for the sake of making it sensational. There was nothing in the movie that was Hollywood-ized. There are a couple cases where when it didn’t matter at all, I conflated two characters. There are three cases where I changed a character’s name. One of those characters we never actually see; it’s an off-screen character. In the other two cases it’s just there was no need to embarrass this person more. You have the exact same movie and the exact same truth if you don’t do that. So don’t do that.”
But is Jessica Alona a real person? Although we are confident that she did, neither the genuine Jessica Alona nor any news organisation have ever conducted an interview with her. We’re not entirely certain that Alona was Mark’s girlfriend, despite the fact that this is how many sources have it.
It should be noted that Mark allegedly met Priscilla Chanin, his current and former girlfriend, during the winter of his sophomore year, around the time he started Thefacebook. But they didn’t begin dating until 2005, a year after Mark hired Pricilla to work at Facebook.
Was FaceMash, a website that let users rank the attractiveness of different college women adjacent to one another, really invented by Mark Zuckerberg?
Yes. based on Wikipedia:
Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. … To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard’s computer network and copied the houses’ private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student directory with photos and basic information, and the initial site generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online. … The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion, but ultimately the charges were dropped.vZuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final by uploading 500 Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section. He opened the site up to his classmates and people started sharing their notes.
The genuine Facemash, in contrast to how it was portrayed in The Social Network, featured images of both men and women, which, in Slate’s opinion, “cuts against the idea of Zuckerberg as a lusty man out for revenge.”
In reality, FaceMash.com is currently being auctioned off on Flippa with a Buy It Now price of $125,000 and a current bid of $15,000.
FaceMash.com allegedly garnered over 22,000 hits in the brief time it was live, according to the movie. How is that possible when each graduating class at Harvard only has around 2,000 students?
According to Harvard, 450 people visited the site in one day and cast at least 22,000 votes. By 10 p.m., the number of visitors had quadrupled.” The complete report regarding the incident from Harvard’s newspaper The Crimson is actually available online.
Was TheFacebook.com indeed discovered by Sean Parker after a one-night fling with a college student?
No, or at least not in Parker’s account. Sean revealed to Vanity Fair that he found the website on the computer of his roommate’s girlfriend. At that point, he made the decision to email Zuckerberg and propose a meeting. The conference was held in New York City.
Has Sean Parker really been detained for having cocaine?
No and yes.
The photograph was taken during Mark Zuckerberg’s deposition in the ConnectU v. Facebook lawsuit and was released by ValleyWag. While at a home party with another Facebook employee, Sean Parker was taken into custody for cocaine possession, although not in the fall of 2004 or in California.
“[Sean] had rented a house right by the beach with several friends, including a young woman who was his assistant at the company. That she wasn’t yet twenty-one would figure in Parker’s later difficulties. One night midway through their vacation week, they threw a party and invited the kite-boarding instructors, who in turn invited a bunch of their local friends. The party got so big that people began dropping in off the beach. Then two nights later, the final night, they hosted another, smaller gathering with the instructors. The group was sitting around drinking beer when a horde of police burst in with a search warrant and drug-sniffing dogs. They said they had a report that the house contained a large amount of cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. They proceeded to search everywhere to find it. Parker and his friends repeatedly insisted that the police were mistaken and that there were no drugs. But finally, after about an hour, a policeman triumphantly returned brandishing a plastic bag containing white powder. Parker, who had signed the rental agreement for the house, was taken to the police station. When he got there he learned there had been reports of drug use following the party two nights earlier. After a lengthy back-and-forth over whether there was even enough evidence to book him, Parker was arrested for felony possession of cocaine. He was not formally charged with a crime. That would require an indictment. he was released immediately.”
In August 2005, while on vacation kiteboarding in North Carolina, the arrest took place. The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick states the following:
Sean wasn’t let go or fired; instead, Peter Thiel, Facebook’s initial investor, persuaded Parker that it would be in both of their best interests to part ways. Sean left his post.
Was Bill Gates’ appearance in the movie as himself actually a cameo?
Nope. The best Bill Gates impersonation in the world, according to Fincher’s statement to EW, is a Seattle-based man. Steve Sires, the actor, also starred in the 2002 movie Nothing So Strange as Gates.
Has The Social Network been watched by The Real Mark Zuckerberg?
While Zuckerberg skirted questions about his opinion of Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of his early years, the 26-year-old CEO did say he’s interested to see what impact The Social Network has on entrepreneurship. He told me that he gets “lots of messages” from people who claim that they have been very much inspired by what he’s done; some say he’s inspired them to go into computer science, others to start their own company. … I couldn’t get him to rate the film for me, but I did get him to talk about what impact he thought it would have on the company he’s built. He’s been asked a lot of questions about what exactly happened during Facebook’s early years, he said in our interview. However, he added, “We build products that 500 million people see… If 5 million people see a movie, it doesn’t really matter that much.”
The Social Network, a new David Fincher film, has been dismissed by Mark Zuckerberg as fiction, and he has even declared that he has no desire or intention of ever seeing it. The co-founder and CEO of Facebook, however, was allegedly seen in Seattle, Washington, for a sneak preview of The Social Network. On the Friday after its release, Zuckerberg did attend a Facebook field trip to watch The Social Network. According to unconfirmed sources, the “Facebook staff has essentially rented up the Century Cinemas 16 in Mountain View, California, where up to 1,200 work members will be watching the film,” according to Mashable. Ben Parr attempted to ask Mark Zuckerberg about his thoughts on the movie, and the following is what he said:
Could Mark Zuckerberg bring legal action against Columbia Pictures for The Social Network?
Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school, said that if Mr. Zuckerberg sued and was declared a public figure, he would then “have to show that the filmmakers knew the statements were false, or were reckless about the possibility of falsehood.” … David L. Hudson Jr., a scholar at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, agreed that “it would be pretty difficult” for a person like Mr. Zuckerberg, with a good likelihood of being found a public figure, to successfully sue over a movie he believes to be libelous.
